Ethical Issues In Marketing Communication

Introduction:

Using verses and slogans that make your minor business sound eye-catching and tempting, even when your message uses slogans that amplify and expand, is common in marketing world. But if this cross the line by misstating facts or making misleading claims, your company will lose the respect of your consumer and you will face legal problems. That’s why understanding the basics of ethics in marketing communications is necessary. This will help you keep advertising, promotional activities and public relations legal and ethical.

Advertising is only one of the aspects of marketing communications, but it is discussed in so much depth, because of the ethical problem and issues related with it. Criticisms of advertising broken down into

Are intrusive and unavoidable: We exposed to hundreds of adverts every day, everywhere e.g. on the television and radio, in newspaper and magazine, on the internet, in stores, on billboards, on the side of buses, at concerts, on tickets and programmes, on athletes and footballers, to the extent that almost no public space free from the reach of corporate branding, sponsorship, or promotion.

2. Create artificial wants: The persuasive nature of advertising has been argued to make us want things that we do not particularly need. Advertising firms generates artificial wants in order to create demands for their own products.

3. Reinforce consumerism and materialism: Generate and penetrate an ideology of materialism in society and to institute in our culture an identification of consumption with happiness.

4. Create insecurity and perpetual dissatisfaction: Critics of advertising have further cotended that by presenting glorified, often unattainable images of “the good life” for us to aspire to, marketing communications creates constant dissatisfaction with our lives and institute a pervading sense of insecurity and

Representatives of those groups bought more than 150 items from Web sites based in seventeen countries, and then tried to return them. It was found that eight percent of the items ordered never arrived; many Web sites did not give clear information about delivery charges; a minority disclosed whether the laws of the seller’s country or the buyer’s country would apply in the event of a dispute, and only fifty-three percent had a return policy. In addition, only about thirteen percent of the sites promised not to sell customers’ personal data to a third party and only thirty-two percent provided information on how to complain if there was a problem with a transaction (Clausing